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Pour out a glass for the second annual Intoxtigation. 562 of you told Cherwell all about where, when, why, and how much ...
26/11/2025

Pour out a glass for the second annual Intoxtigation. 562 of you told Cherwell all about where, when, why, and how much you’re drinking. Now it’s time to reveal the results.
We received responses from every college, but excluded colleges from rankings when they were based on fewer than seven responses (Merton, Mansfield, St Catherine’s, and Trinity).
The most alcoholic college was New College, while the most teetotal was Lady Margaret Hall. The booziest courses didn’t necessarily correspond with stereotypes: Engineering Science students spent the most time per week drinking, while Theology and Religion was the most sober.
There was an even split between college bars and pubs overall, but this changed between years. First-years drank the most in college accommodation, second-years were evenly split between college bars and pubs, while third and fourth-years overwhelmingly preferred pubs.
The best and worst bar were unequivocal: according to our respondents, you should get your socials to Balliol bar, and stay away from Wadham College.

🖊️Cherwell Features

Image credit: Aury Mosseri for Cherwell

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After the Cambridge Student Union (SU) voted to disaffiliate from the National Union of Students (NUS) last month, Oxfor...
26/11/2025

After the Cambridge Student Union (SU) voted to disaffiliate from the National Union of Students (NUS) last month, Oxford University students should be left with questions about whether the NUS is equipped to live up to the political moment, especially after years of watering down their radicalism.

The official case for the motion to disaffiliate claimed that the NUS has “ignored calls from students nationwide, and a motion passed at their own highest democratic decision making body, to campaign for Palestine”. This is not the first time that the NUS has been challenged in recent years, especially over what Amnesty International has described as the apartheid and genocide in Palestine. In the last three years, SUs at the Universities of Warwick and York have tabled disaffiliation motions, citing Islamophobia, antisemitism, and anti-Palestinian racism in the organisation. Cardiff SU voted against renewing their NUS affiliation just last week.

 However, there is a much longer history here that Oxford students should consider: that of a once-vital student organisation slowly fading from relevance, of one we desperately need back. If Oxford disaffiliating could serve as a step towards an effective and principled NUS, it is one we should seriously consider.

🖊️Archie Johnston

Image credit: Stanley Smith for Cherwell

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Students from the University of Oxford and Oxford Brookes University queued for over 48 hours this week to secure housin...
26/11/2025

Students from the University of Oxford and Oxford Brookes University queued for over 48 hours this week to secure housing for the next academic year. The agency, Finders Keepers, released 40 properties for three or four occupants at 9am on Tuesday morning, to a waiting queue of more than one hundred students.

At 5.40am on Monday morning, there were already ten students queuing down the side of the letting office. Three groups of students had pitched tents, two of which were set up in front of the office windows. Due to the cold temperatures, most people in the queue were dressed in hats, scarves, and winter coats.

🖊️ Archie Johnston

Image Credit: Stanley Smith for Cherwell

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I’d been warned about the dating scene at Oxford. There’s something about self-entitlement that sharpens the sting of ho...
25/11/2025

I’d been warned about the dating scene at Oxford. There’s something about self-entitlement that sharpens the sting of hook-up culture. One too many walks of shame through the city centre as students flocked to their 9ams taught me all too clearly that academic and emotional intelligence do not always develop in equal measures. And so, earlier this year, I made a pact with a friend that we would both download Hinge. Given my track record of Kanye-defenders, love-bombers, and emotionally under-developed mummy’s boys, I figured that I had nothing to lose.

The notion of romance, naively supported throughout childhood through the Hallmark staples of love letters, roses, and the meet-cute, has, inevitably, evolved in the digital age. The whole process of dating has become ‘gamified’, and romantic decisions are compressed into the tap of a button – a bleak arcade machine where the prize is usually disappointment. If you’re looking for the reasons behind the dwindling marriage rates, I have an entire album of screenshots that make a strong case. Somewhere between the third “I’ll fall for you if… you trip me” prompt, and the eighth awkward group photo (it’s always the one you hope for the least), I came to accept the fact that I wasn’t going to find the one on Hinge.

🖊️Beatrix Arnold

Image credit: CC0 1.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Read online at cherwell.org

Exeter College has unveiled its plans for EXOq, a new research and innovation environment to be built near Oxford Parkwa...
24/11/2025

Exeter College has unveiled its plans for EXOq, a new research and innovation environment to be built near Oxford Parkway Station in north Oxford, which will house a pioneering ‘supercomputer’. The project name, EXOq, combines the college’s initials with the letter ‘q’, referencing quantum computing and the site’s research goals. A public consultation on the proposals took place at the North Oxford Golf Club from 13th to 15th November.

Exeter College said in a press release that the site’s newly-built data centres will be able to host sovereign High-Performance Computing (HPC) infrastructure, which is intended to support research of global significance. The project will develop existing supercomputing discoveries in health, robotics, particle physics, and climate research in order to tackle some of the biggest issues facing the world today. The data centres are also expected to include trusted research environments capable of hosting sensitive datasets such as NHS data.

🖊️ Samyuktha Kovilakath

Image credit: EXOq, with permission

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The product of a controversial £150 million donation, the new Schwarzman building is a dominating new presence for the c...
24/11/2025

The product of a controversial £150 million donation, the new Schwarzman building is a dominating new presence for the city and university, built within the architectural patchwork of the Radcliffe Observatory, Somerville College, and the Blavatnik School of Government. But whilst the Blavatnik takes its cue from the sleek, all-glass modernism of a Canary Wharf skyscraper, the behemothic Schwarzman, designed by Hopkins’ Architects, offers an entirely different impression.

🖋️Fredrik Mitchell O'Reilly

Image Credit: ResonantDistortion, CC BY-SA 4.0, via openverse

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Tidal Theatre’s Launa (at the BT 18-22nd November) is exactly the kind of play that the student drama scene needs more o...
23/11/2025

Tidal Theatre’s Launa (at the BT 18-22nd November) is exactly the kind of play that the student drama scene needs more of. It was original, witty, bold and colourful, with an incredibly authentic portrayal of grief in all its forms. 

Rowan Brown’s impressive original script explores the emotional turmoil of Edna (Sanaa Pasha), a once hopeless romantic processing the death of her daughter Launa (Coco Scanlon) at just six years old. The production’s choreography reflected Edna’s dreamlike state, in which she tortures herself with imaginary conversations with shifting versions of a grown-up Launa. Alongside these central interactions, Edna’s husband Jo (Callum Beardmore), sister, Beth (Kitty Brown), and mother, Helen (Rosie Sutton), break through her preoccupied state to attempt to encourage her to begin her life again.

🖊️ Charlie Bailey

Image Credit: Alice Mitchell with permission

Approximately 50 protesters staged a demonstration outside the Campsfield House immigration detention centre in Kidlingt...
22/11/2025

Approximately 50 protesters staged a demonstration outside the Campsfield House immigration detention centre in Kidlington, Oxfordshire, this afternoon. The protest included students from the University of Oxford and was organised by the Coalition to Keep Campsfield Closed. The group are campaigning to prevent the government from reopening the detention centre after it closed in 2018 following concerns about safety and living conditions.

The coalition was founded by Asylum Welcome, a charity providing support and advice to asylum seekers and refugees living in Oxfordshire, as well as the Oxford branch of Student Action for Refugees (STAR) who seek to build “a more just society for refugees in Oxford and beyond”. The groups were joined by members of the Stand Up to Racism movement, as well as local residents during the demonstration.

The protesters held placards reading “freedom is a human right”, and a banner which read “coalition to keep campsfield closed” was draped across a sign at the entrance to the Oxford Technology Park. Song sheets were also handed out, with activists singing: “It could be you, running from the guns and bombs…It could be us, fleeing from famine and war.”

🖊️ Cherwell News

Image Credit: David Hays for Cherwell

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Women’s health is a curious thing. It’s not unusual to come home from a GP appointment with an unshakeable sense of disa...
21/11/2025

Women’s health is a curious thing. It’s not unusual to come home from a GP appointment with an unshakeable sense of disappointment, and often more questions and frustrations than you had in the first place. Symptoms are often diminished or disregarded altogether; women are consistently treated as inadequate authorities on their own health. It was only in the 90s that it became common practice to include women in clinical trials, meaning that the very metrics by which we determine physical health are inherently flawed. What this has caused is a profound sense of mysticism when it comes to problems relating to women’s health, particularly hormonal problems.

🖊️Amy Lawson

Image credit: Henry Fuseli, PDM 1.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Read online at cherwell.org

Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen once observed that “we are heading into a world where a flat screen TV that covers yo...
21/11/2025

Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen once observed that “we are heading into a world where a flat screen TV that covers your entire wall costs $100, and a four year college degree costs $1 million, and nobody has anything even resembling a proposal on how to systemically fix this.” This stark contrast is increasingly relevant in the face of a proposed 6% government levy on international student tuition fees, which currently range from £37,380 to £62,820 annually, to supposedly increase funds for maintenance grants. We need to ask: is this the right mechanism for supporting domestic students? Or is it a more palatable xenophobia under the guise of helping home students? 

English higher‐education institutions currently receive over £10 billion a year in international-student fees income, meaning this levy could cost universities in the region of £620 million annually, with Oxford alone owing around £17 million each year. These not insubstantial numbers mean that the University must either choose to absorb the tax or pass it onto students, the latter being frequently criticised as an unsustainable solution. As someone already subject to the whims of international tuition prices, behind the rhetoric of helping home students lies a deeper issue – one that exposes the corruption baked into tuition-based university funding itself.

International students, who already pay triple what their domestic peers do, are being cast as convenient cash cows. The government claims the levy will strengthen the “skills system” and widen access. Yet, as the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) notes, there’s no clear mechanism ensuring that the funds will ever return to universities or benefit students directly. It’s a familiar sleight of hand: siphon from higher education, promise reform, deliver austerity.

🖊️Zahara Agarwal

Image credit: Stanley Smith for Cherwell

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Microsoft Forms and student satisfaction polls mark our email inboxes each year as the University-wide drive for tour gu...
19/11/2025

Microsoft Forms and student satisfaction polls mark our email inboxes each year as the University-wide drive for tour guides, alumni testimonials, and the best college-branded pens and tote bags begins. From TikTok trends to residential programmes, all these bureaucratic efforts play a part in the race to lure in the best selection of prospective students. But state-school intake continues to fall. Can we be sure that Oxford’s colleges’ efforts to achieve diversity and variation in their student body are working? On top of the responsibility of maintaining regional affiliations, in the dynamic, modern Oxford of 2025 which should be prioritised: the historic or the holistic?

Annually receiving over 23,000 applications for the past five years for around 3,500 places, the concept of outreach at a university like Oxford is not about getting more people to apply, but ensuring that those people are a broad cross section of prospective undergraduates. Concentration of applicants and offer-holders, in one school, one region, or one socioeconomic class, risks losing equally capable applicants from other backgrounds. This balance is easier said than done.

🖊️Leo Jones and Fin Dinnen

Image credit: Indiana Sharp for Cherwell

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I have two connections to Cecil Rhodes and the controversy surrounding institutions’ memorialisation of colonial figures...
19/11/2025

I have two connections to Cecil Rhodes and the controversy surrounding institutions’ memorialisation of colonial figures. My grandfather won a Rhodes Scholarship almost 70 years ago, and it was at Oxford University that he met and married my grandmother. More recently, my last years of secondary education saw controversy over my school’s statue of its founder and benefactor, Royal African Company shareholder Robert Aske.

What to make, then, of Oriel College’s recent attempts to contextualise Rhodes’ legacy? An exhibition, first shown at the college and now at the University Church, features sculptures by Zimbabwean artists of the Chitungwiza Arts Centre representing “a figurative or semi-abstract reflection on the impact of Rhodes’ colonial wars on the people of Zimbabwe”. The works are thought-provoking examinations of the past, centred around competition winner Wallace Mkhanka’s Blindfolded Justice.

Yet The Rhodes Legacy Through the Eyes of Zimbabwean Sculptors disappoints. It fails to address both Rhodes’ crimes and the influence of his money over modern Oxford, trivialising previous efforts to do so. Colonial figures’ names are immortalised across the city in buildings, statues, and portraits, ignoring their bloody legacies. Oriel, and the University, must act further against this culture of convenient forgetfulness.

🖊️Ti-Jean Martin

Image credit: Stanley Smith for Cherwell

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